Raedthinn seems to have fully recovered from his dental ordeal. There are differences… his tongue now sticks out the side of his mouth and, oddly, seems to project further. But otherwise, he seems fine.

In the last few years a particular talking point has become as inevitable after a domestic mass killing as a sunrise after night: “is this a crazy person or a terrorist.” This becomes increasingly obvious when the mass killing is carried out by a White Non-Muslim Male, such as the “Planned Parenthood” shootings a few days ago. The argument goes, since it’s a White Non-Muslim Male, it will be declared an act of mental disorder, not terrorism; but if the perpetrator is Non-White or, better, Muslim, it’ll be declared terrorism, because, you know, racism.

In a Venn diagram of “nutjobbery” and “terrorism,” there is of course a whole lot of overlap. Consequently, taking an incident and confidently parking it under one descriptor but not the other is often dubious. But I do have a simple test that would work at least sometimes to parse out those acts that are best described as “terrorism:” How many people were involved?

If it’s one person working alone, such as, say, Sulejman Talović (a Muslim immigrant who killed five people at a mall in Salt Lake City some years ago, an act I’d bet most people have either forgotten about or perhaps never heard of in the first place), or the Unabomber (a white leftist with a hate-on for modern technology), or Christopher Dorner (the black anti-gun-nut who led the LAPD on a merry chase a few years ago) it could go either way. But if two or more are working together? Like the Beltway sniper case from years ago, or the Boston bombings, Charlie Hebdo, the more recent Paris attacks, 9/11 and so on? Well… that would seem rather harder to blame on nuttery rather than terrorism.

People with similar political and/or religious ideologies finding each other and working together? Sure, I can see that happening, easy. Complete whackos finding each other and finding that their whackoism just happens to align, so they work together to do whacko things? Hmmm… that’s less likely. And when the number of perpetrators gets to three or higher, the statistical likelihood of it being just nutjobbery, as opposed to terrorism, seems to drop vanishingly low.

U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act does a number of things, including limiting US Government regulations meddling and recognizing that materials mined from asteroids and comets are the property of the companies that mined them (although not going to far as recognizing the private ownership of said comets or asteroids).

So I’m considering how to game the system. You can’t own the rock, but you can own the stuff you dig out of the rock. So, how to use this to own the rock? Well, presumably “stuff mined from the rock” means anything that’s a minority of the rock that you remove from the rock. So… break the rock into two halves of about 49%, and a handful of gravel. Now, the entire mass of the rock is somethign you’ve mined from the rock.

For a rock a few meters in diameter, this would be easy enough. But how about something like Vesta? Breaking apart a rock miles wide is impractical. But there’s this: grind up a portion of the rock into dust. Scatter the dust across the entire surface of the rock, anything from a light dusting to a few cm thick, blanketing the entire surface. Now… you don’t own the rock, but you own a shell that entirely encompasses the rock. For someone else to attempt to access the rock, they would have to breach your property.

A lot of this won’t matter for a good long while, of course. For this to be relevant, you’ll need to have both Space Cops *and* Space Robbers. If next year Disney-SpaceX announced that they had taken possession of Eros and were busy turning it into ErosWorld, The Happiest Place In Heliocentric Space, it’s not like there’s a whole lot that the Russians or the UN could do to stop it except to complain and push for economic sanctions. At some point, the Russians or Chinese or somebody might be able to mount an armed expedition to go take Eros fro Disney-SpaceX; and at *that* point some definition of private property rights in space would be handy to have.

In short: during October and November, at least 11 boats have been found floating off the cost of Japan with only dead folk for crew. The thinking is that these are North Korean fishing boats. What with ongoing famine, coupled with a lack of modern navigational equipment, I guess it makes sense that Nork fishermen would set out on voyages they’re simply not going to come back from, but, dayum. What’s next? Ghost pirates? Pirate ghosts?

This is a series of illustrations that imitates the style of old medieval paintings and adds a macabre flavour by incorporating some of H.P. Lovecraft’s famous monsters. The text is mostly medieval Middle High German.

Another rare piece of early Dyna Soar color art. This one shows the Dyna Soar heading to space atop the centaur upper stage of an Atlas booster. And if you think you are seeing corrugations on the back of the spaceplane, you are correct. At this stage in the design process the Dyna Soar *did* […]

So the media is currently ulcerating over Trump suggesting that he’d like to see NFL owners fire players who decide to disrespect the US flag & anthem before games. Here’s the thing: 1: It’s the players right to disrespect the flag, the anthem, the US. 2: It’s any citizens right to say that he’d like […]

Yes, I’ve posted these before. But I feel it’s important for everyone to maintain a proper level of understanding of the encabulator, the turbo-encabulator and the retro-encabulator. And of course once you have an encabulator, you’ll need to diagnose it from time to time: There have of course been advances in the field […]

Argh. Facebook is not my favorite thing. But, apparently, it’s where all the cool kids hang out, so the Aerospace Projects Review Facebook page that I cobbled together years ago, I’ve started posting things in again. One of the weird things about Facebook is that you (apparently) can’t see a page unless you are signed […]

Oh, boy! Mayhem! A Group Of 62 Catholics Has Accused The Pope Of Spreading Heresy Not being Catholic, I have no dog in this fight. Still, it’s always entertaining when religious leaders tell other religious leaders they’re wrong. Wacky hijinks often ensue.

So, Star Trek Discovery plopped onto the airwaves tonight. My review: It was certainly pretty, but all those visuals were spoiled by a whole lot of “WTF am I looking at?” Especially with the “Klingons” who bore almost no relationship to any prior iteration of the Klingons, in biology, aesthetics or culture. Heck, they even […]

… in a drone: This is pretty much exactly the sort of footage that would have been impossible to get prior to the current generation of drones. So just imagine what people will be able to film once the batteries for drones are actually *good,* with the power and energy density of chemical fuels like […]

OK, let’s say your town is plagued by a transdimensional monster that takes the form of a killer psychotic clown. Who would be the best person to try to destroy this menace? That’s right, the goddamn Batman: And because why not: Bill Nye just walked into our elevator while I was snap chatting.. pic.twitter.com/LwCOITAEft […]

A deli worker was attacked, someone came across the counter and slashed at him with a knife. He fought back with a knife of his own, and the other guy got the worse of it. So, what happened? Did the city of New York throw the deli worker a ticker tape parade? Give him the […]